Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.
It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.
At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).
That was a little ambiguous, because he said that after London was the major city that voted against Brexit, he was saying it was more foreign (European) than English. Schroedinger’s asshole type of comment.
Also he said that because he was pro Brexit (which is already not good), so it might not have been about skin color at all, just international European culture.
He did get caught in the Rowling shitshow, early on when he started saying “I just hope (trans people) are treated kindly” but slowly admitted that he only had surface knowledge and let it slip that he thought the whole trans thing was an act or a choice. I don’t think he was malicious or aggressive about it, but he was called out on propagating transphobic messages.
And he spoke up against cancel culture.
It’s possible that he doesn’t understand that even if he doesn’t mean bad things, he’s letting bad propaganda slip out and repeating a language that hurts easily targeted people without understanding the scope. But he doesn’t seem very willing to learn quickly about it.
I haven’t heard anything recent if he changed his mind or double down about any of this.